Leave it to Fox News bigot Todd Starnes to describe a shifting American mindset about the Confederacy as “a full-fledged cultural cleansing of the Southern states.”
In an article on FoxNews.com, called “The Cultural Cleansing of the Southern States Begins,” Starnes complains:
A full-fledged cultural cleansing of the Southern states is underway as lawmakers debate whether to remove Confederate flags and rename schools and parks named after Confederate war heroes.
…Has the Department of Homeland Security classified the Sons and Daughters of the Confederacy as right-wing hate groups, yet?
…I reckon it’s only a matter of time before they bulldoze the Confederate grave yards and war memorials too.
Maybe we can just pretend the Civil War never happened.
Of course, Starnes doesn’t give a moment’s thought to the sizeable number of Americans who are offended by honoring those who supported slavery and who literally didn’t want to be part of our country. Even as he attacks others for not being American enough and attacks others for not being "one nation, under God."
Confederate flag image By William Porcher Miles (1822-1899) (Vector graphics image by Crotalus horridus) This vector image was created with Inkscape. (SVG adapted from this image) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons
What Starnes conveniently forgets is that the Confederate BATTLE flag was first used in the post-Civil War era by the KKK, and its sole purpose was to intimidate the newly-freed Blacks.
He also conveniently forgets that the current “battle” over the flag is the DIRECT result of white supremacists (almost exclusively in the South) using the flag to symbolize DEFIANCE against the Federal government’s decision to enforce school desegregation laws as well as pressing for full rights to Blacks (while bigotry itself wasn’t limited to the South, you didn’t see white legislatures in Michigan, California and New Jersey raising the Battle flag to display their bigotry). The flag that’s come under such criticism in recent days in South Carolina did NOT fly over the State Capitol (or any other State government building) until 1961—on the 100th anniversary of the day that Confederate forces fired on the Union garrison at Fort Sumter. As a sidenote, just 13 years earlier, the flag started making a return to prominence conservative Southern racist Democrats (who would later become the Dixiecrats) started protesting Truman’s desegregating the military. And at that year’s Democratic convention, Southern delegates were raucous and waved Confederate flags in support of Georgia Senator Russell’s nomination against Truman. When Truman got the nomination, these Democrats split to form the avowedly racist, segregationist Dixiecrat Party (officially the States’ Rights Democratic Party) and won the full electoral votes of four states (LA, MI, AL, and, of course, SC; the party also got 1 elector from TN).
Kind of ironically, the current state flag of SC (the blue field with the palmetto and crescent moon) was first adopted after the state seceded and was retained after the War.
’Southern Heritage" STILL refers to traitors whose rallying cry of “states rights” meant the right to own slaves. I have no doubt that many of the people who are “outraged” about the Confederate flag would if they could, happily return to the days when whites could own black people as slaves.